into the place people were clustered,
waiting,
for the permission to enter,
to sit,
to partake.

then, into the steam of creation,
where farm-raised met man-made,
and the soup that stirred us so deeply
was crushed from
spiny shells
from something sap-like,
verdigris.

it was the day after,
and the night before,
and we did not know the morning wait would be so long.

that the rain would come down so soft,
and the wind would be so hard,
and that we would cluster with the others,
and still smile.

that children would bring roses,
and strangers bear cake,
and one lone girl would bring dry socks
“so you don’t get cold feet”.

that the countdown to the front door
would become so epic,
that being among the three thousand
would be nothing
compared to the first time we spoke those words.

history writes itself unexpectedly into our lives.

I did not get on one knee to him.

I looked into his eyes above the sea,
the golden gate behind him,
and begged him to understand.

forgive.

to love me
enough.

to find his way past the expected,
and my clumsy passion,
and the way
we would want things to be.

to stand with me for seven hours
waiting.
to say those few words before a stranger.
to hold a piece of paper
that said
for the first time in a country’s history,
as he had told me so often in our history,
yes.

of you, I spoke in rhythm,
with waves and pleasure
banging my calves as I began.

knowing not.
caring little.

opening my mouth
to the possibility of poetry
in your being.

and this led,
as all words do,
to miscomprehension and interpretative fault
and long pauses
and hesi
tation.

so i spoke more of love,
as if to capture
in the noise
some essence
of that thing
that makes me dizzy with you.

and it was infantile,
as all words will be
when we utter
love.

so I spake of my own being
and tried to keep it short.

which is very hard to do
for one who speaks
so
much.

and it was
predictably dictable,
dour,
and rife with words like rife.

so I spoke of things we shared
and then things we knew
and then things material,
then immaterial,
and the words cluttered the air
around me,
filtered through the place between us,
gnatlike possessions,
so the light became viscous and milky.

an incantation
something like a spell,
something that requires myrrh and blood of doves,
something dark and pure to trace in the air
around them
to protect them
to guard them from the night.

close your eyes and think of the green eyed girl,
the one who always laughed first,
the one who did not watch for signs,
and barely read the tales,
for she seemed to know
that she would simply live
and others would write of her, this time.

close your eyes and think of the tall boy,
the one who leapt in the air,
the one who led the way because he did not have time to wait.
think of how he felt when he saw her,
the light in her eyes,
her shoulder bare and golden,
and think of how he leapt, then.

we were all lulled to sleep
with stories of finding and loss,
with wolves and witches and mirrors that kept secrets,
so what do you do
when the story is much simpler,
when the magic is just about
them?

you hold your breath.
you count the seconds.
you watch as they touch
and there is nothing to compare.

fresh,
like mornings over mountains.

clear,
like water over stone.

new,
like the same smile, the one you know,
coming to you again.

this is love.

and it does not matter who rescues whom.

you can close the book, now.

there is no incantation to protect them. to lead them. to keep them. to hold them.

in the garden there are aspens now turning yellow.
and roses, now slowing, still blooming white.
in the closets there are sweaters the colors of wet stones;
stacks of scarves so elaborate each deserves its orange box,
disregarding, perhaps,
being bound up alone.

the baccarat is ruby,
a gift given gradually,
a collection of crystal from a fragile man.
there are plates shaded like sand dunes
and flatware like seashells
and floors like a child’s blood
drawn in preschool.

there is velvet on the sofa like the sky before dusk
and leather cracked and golden like the sky after dawn.
the lamps are black lacquer
and the walls are hot chocolate
or coffee or licorice or bittersweet
to taste.

the linens on the bed will flicker like candlelight
violet and cream,
sepia and white.
the walls of the bedroom will glow in that candlelight:
strawlike and stemlike
crisp and silk striped.

and they all flicker madly
to catch your attention,
they compete and repeat their chorus to the night.

but I have your hand and your mouth and your eyesight,
and I fill your head
and I color your life.

and so the colors of the night, revealed to none yet known by all,
rush heady and headlong into this room.

the candle now cliche by bed
has rimmed the wall with elephant skin and lit the edge of your
topography
like sunrise setting on a veldt.

and your fingers seek my skin like rainfall
pattering to find their way,
my blood responds beneath the tensile, slick, productive surface skin,
though it cannot see the hand
or the force that moves it from above.

and the gray circle in my eyes that binds the color,
that binds the dark,
contracts so slightly
you can hear it rustle;
an animal in tall grass
a limb under a moon.

there are no beatings and the breath is held, suspension over the world tonight.

for when two lovers find the tinder,
fumble for flint,
for a word fit to ignite,
the gray circle
expands
again,
it does not tighten,
it reaches outward, afraid to bind the very thing that makes it holy,
the kiss of a lover,
the look in his eye.

the place where there are no gifts,
the moment where there are no words,
the location of loss
and the parallel of joy,
here is where love at last rests.

I have watched a decade,
both empty of you and full,
skip before me like ribbon down a stairwell,
and I know that I have learned nothing
and learned it a million times.

I know that there is no way to pinpoint
and that definition is something best left for scholars
far brighter than I.
I know that I am quicksilver and that you are stone;
that you are the wind and I am stone;
that the world changes with an utterance,
and in a day is made unwhole.

how interwoven are we,
like fingers into fists?
or are we drawn along a skein more silken,
expected to form a mantilla for shelter, a coverlet for night?

I hear sentences in the air,
and I close my eyes and reach for the ground, to find you, where you are not listening.
and I am thankful for your earth rich constancy,
for your orbital pull upon my corpse,
and your visceral pull on my soul.

I do not deserve, but I demand. and you will provide,
unable to resist the potion or the poison,
mead of my lips and my mind,
biting and dark, saplike and viscous, tender as night,
spilled upon a page or a sheet or a parchment or sand.
it matters not which age.

you will be there.

at this point so relative, where hands are taken off
the clock,
I shake, I breathe, I release, I void,
for we are going to be here awhile.

the coat was brown this time, perhaps because she knew our palette,
or was settling into some personal winter.

the one before had landed in union pier,
separating from the cluster of red siblings above the door
and stretching across my back before we made it to the beach,
before the sun set on our left, trading sky with water,
before I sat beside paul
and time skipped something into the ever graying moment,
and tim, down the way, with two dogs at his heels was caught on camera,
he was still tall
and erin still was lovely and my
voice was still speaking as I moved into a cloud.

then this one found me perhaps by hunch,
or sympathetic vibration,
and walked with great deliberation into our home and put herself
where we would see
that time
sometimes
favors those who honor memory.

there is a music box in another room,
a room that is not mine,
and like the lit bathroom
and the dog with it's ears taped back,
I run from it simply because I must.

there is a music box in another room,
like a fragment of a dream,
recurring the following day,
it plays for a moment,
and leaves me disconcerted,
moved,
and still alone.

there is a music box in another room,
and no matter where I travel,
or place myself intentionally,
there it remains,
faint and pressing,
insistent and deliberate.

there is a music box in another room,
sweet sweet secret of the child,
hollow eyes from lacking sleep,
trembling with morning passion and the birth of sunlight,
it reaches through the lists to find the human soul.

there is a music box in another room,
where you had placed it,
not an actual box,
with no real tune,
but important nonetheless,
because your hands touched it in the other room.

oh, these elegant women.
walking quietly into my life,
with their gris and speckled eyes,
how they settle at my side,
how they hold my hand,
uninvited.

Do not cry to me companion of my youth, and tell me of the struggle
to return to whom you were.
The creature prints,
and wedding you hate,
and bells still ringing around your head.
There were choices when you sat
in the conference room,
when we walked above the river at night,
watching the city glint,
dancing with drag queens on Friday.

You were led away from your daydreams,
by steps all your own.
And you, with the well known beauty,
what drifts below your face,
currents of something even Paul will never know.
I suspect treachery at times,
delicious treacles,
interludes you savor all alone.

I guess.

And I know.

Fear motivates us,
and secures our seclusion.

But oh, the lovely.
In you I can only see pain,
ill-concealed, '
well worn
across your expanse.
The world has brought you much,
often,
soon.

Elizabethan porcelain,
without saucer for the overflow,
you live balanced upon breakage,
wanting to be held in a curved palm.

And when drugs can't regulate the jagged,
and the men don't rescue your body,
and your itches drive you
to cut yourself and drain,
I wish I could hold you again,
my oldest friend,
my unexpected redhead,
I am
ineffectual
to
you.

They walk into other rooms,
carrying my number,
folded where they will never find it,

the text message -

some dull small hope
some decision not to feel
some anticipated ending
some understanding of the real
some gram measure of resignation
some despair
some desire
some pierson on the bookshelf
some momentary lies
to myself.

some sense of the best of me
awoken after dormancy.

some reluctance to admit
defeat.

some sorrow
and some thankfulness
some motion
and some acceptance
that it was not
meant
to continue
past this
solitary point.

some feeling that it gave too much happiness
and that intensity
would burn
some of me
and all of he.

gravitas -

I will not ask you to explain.

when the moon tears at the seas,
calling with some force that we have tried to define
as “gravity”,
I hear instead the echo of sadness
in her light
a keening against the distance between her surface
and the reflective shimmer of the saltwater
below.

I have seen, and never questioned,
as leaves and petals and the injured
drop
as if summoned by the earth
to return
now
home.

I have felt the sinking and the rising
in my own chest
when you enter the room.

I do not need to know of circumference or of apogee,
of lunar cycles or the time between
when we touched
and when we met
and when I knew.

every night, I close my eyes beneath the moon
that I was born beneath.

and I now know why I have been drawn to the sea
and the air
each night
in my dreams.

Before -

I wish I could capture the air for you today.

There is the sense of something impending,
and suddenly I remember the way the skies turned green
before hurricanes
in my teenage years.
This air is different,
there is not weight, there is lightness,
there is flavor,
and suddenly my eyes well up
and my stride soften.

And there are birds, birdsong,
so many birds,
but I can see no trees.

This can only mean
the coming
is momentous,
if it is stirring unseen wings.

If you were here, before I reached the corner
I would ask you.

And you, perhaps,
would take my hand,
take the corner,
and tell me
to just
wait.

hibernate -

I have taken the drugs to put myself under
but still, I am forced to watch the night sky.

It is lit from below by this city I do not
understand,
or wish to comprehend. I think I was enamored too early
by the spring that was eternal,
by the views at every turn.

Home has always been my refuge,
and now I find that I am more fugitive
from these gray skied mornings and cloud covered nights,
yearning for the consistency of changing weather,
of seasons that lead eventually
to snow.

Because snow knows no enemies,
it bring no fear.

It covers all equally,
masks and blankets,
muffles and stills.

It is heavy solace to the long year past,
layered like forgiveness over allergen and pod,
forcing dormancy,
and what I most seek,
sleep.

just a step beyond the rain –

with the birds on the wire,
waiting for the fog to part in the mission,
it began to clarify.
waiting for the rays to outline their bodies,
etch them, bleeding gray out from their charcoal feathers,
into a splintering day,
I could see.

with the dado of the Victorian,
when we returned from walking the dog,
thirty some steps from our home on the hill,
you could see.
carved in plaster:
two mountains, one tree.
and turning to see one tree, two peaks,
and the lit window, waiting,
just below.

it seems now we live where the sun begins,
where the sky stays open above us in inclemency,
where even the stars cluster to escape the rain.
the embrace of the weather is around us.
see the valley to either side fill:
here a chalice,
here a bowl.

this is mystic, set in the sky,
mounted like a diadem unreachable by quest.
the last was grounded, settled in stone,
cornered where winds met.
perhaps they conspired
to keep the world at bay.

my home is was will be with you,
belden on,
rocoe on,
aldine on,
now.
and I need no signs to reveal.
I have known this
from the moment I heard of you,
once in a lullaby.

room 1122 –

I open the curtains and think of you somewhere
distant,
colder,
to my left up the coast.

I would listen for you
over the hum of the strip
but the harmony of stopping and starting
the lights both white (on the left)
and red (on the right)
all blur the frequency of cell phone
and heartbeat.

I wish for a map
as if it will solve
my fingers tracing the windowpane
up the curve of sunset (on the left)
and down fountain (on the right)
like the curve of the seine past la reine blanche
like the path from 685 east 82nd
to the park
where the sprinklers lie.

I wish for a map
to find my way back
to that place where I ran through false rain
to where we ate free and walked on cobblestone
to you.

something that reaches deep inside –

it is not the green or the rhyme.
without reason, it chooses.
debate it as you will,
in the end it does not matter,
it will decide for you,
leave you,
and you will know too late to wonder.

it is mechanism in retrospect,
decision that you made that led to this place here,
snow without footprints,
dog asleep, breathing, on your numbing leg,
picture fallen from album found under blanket,
email in the inbox,
never opened.

it is chilling to the sense of freedom
we are told to cherish
when it happens,
but it happens,
and there is a sudden glimpse of the plan.

a silk and shining map
beneath us.

we should know from their return
that it is happening
(now, it is happening)
friends left unforgiven,
family presents unbought and unsent and unspoken.
love never released.

back because the twine had twisted
and the shimmer of heat from the road
was a warning
you did not see.
and so you, in the front door, as my car pulled away,
and the photograph of us in the halflight on that mountain,
and Lauren walking slowly in the wet grass, in the white dress,
and how thin the dog was after the trip,
and the letter you use as a bookmark at night,
and your mother’s voice on the answering machine tape,
and the name of the orchid,
and the story we tell of the night we met,
and lying alone on the warm stone floors,
and aspens,
and choosing a color, a diamond, a band,
and the light in the trees, the light in the trees
(you always stopped me to see that, light in the trees)

How the end must feel -

I will wear green and face the sun.

a white noise of heat and pressure, a glinting reverie, a removal.
a great gift of a simple day
a plan not made
a removal, again.

the turmoil of your language
which I am deciphering in parses
and the way in which I deserve this,
this uncertainty,
this groping,
it leaves me without the sleep I so crave,
it woke me often at first,
then less so
then more so
then more so, again.

I have loved you well and I have loved you long;
I have written so often of your eyes.

and I have left you in the place where I now find myself.

but I am not good in this universe,
I survive best in my own.

I long for this scarf,
this twist of air and cashmere,
this thing to wrap around my shoulders
my neck,
like a cry,
like a tourniquet,
like a bird held roughly in the hand,
all of these things,
sound and blood and anger,
all of these things, again.

So she will sit in Central Park,
sometime in the sixties,
with legs curled as a calligraph,
and hair bound with a scarf,
and arms pressing down,
to hold the earth,

a young Grace,
with green eyes.

Or she will tum the faulted corner
with a word like phyllo or duerme,
and I will see her absorbed with Maria,
brushing her hair back
in a Puerto Rican spell.

She was not a woman who would ever dance alone.

I wondered at one point,
had someone spirited her away,
told her things
that we were never meant to hear,
so did she,
unwittingly,
bake them into her breads,
ladle them into our bowls,
scent her golden hair with whispers.

That would explain much.

Why there was a chill when she left a room.

Quiet when she tired of things.

Safety in her arms and the sound of her Spanish,
the mother tongue I never learned.

The balance of her love was heavy on this heart,
and marks me to this day.